Times of turmoil are trying for us all

Published: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 02:53 PM.

Sometimes, even people in our business are beaten down by an overload of bad news.

That’s especially true today, an age where new media outlets emerge by the second. There’s print reporting, TV reporting, online reporting and now social media reporting. Via the latter, by definition, anyone with a smartphone is a reporter, photographer or videographer.

It’s in our faces every single day.

Everything is connected. Nothing takes place in isolation. Events cascade upon each other. The world is too much with us. Everyone knows everything, right now, even if it’s wrong. Nobody knows anything.

What a stunning 10 days this country has just endured. History eventually may sort it out, but now there is only grief and dislocation.

Bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon last Monday, Patriot’s Day in the Hub City. By Friday, an entire American city had been locked down, an all-out manhunt was under way.

A fertilizer plant that may not have been inspected in 28 years blew up in Texas. At least a dozen firefighters and first-responders died. Around the nation, heroes were not in short supply. Some wore uniforms. Some wore running shorts. Some wore scrubs splattered in blood.

Sometimes, even people in our business are beaten down by an overload of bad news.

That’s especially true today, an age where new media outlets emerge by the second. There’s print reporting, TV reporting, online reporting and now social media reporting. Via the latter, by definition, anyone with a smartphone is a reporter, photographer or videographer.

It’s in our faces every single day.

Everything is connected. Nothing takes place in isolation. Events cascade upon each other. The world is too much with us. Everyone knows everything, right now, even if it’s wrong. Nobody knows anything.

What a stunning 10 days this country has just endured. History eventually may sort it out, but now there is only grief and dislocation.

Bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon last Monday, Patriot’s Day in the Hub City. By Friday, an entire American city had been locked down, an all-out manhunt was under way.

A fertilizer plant that may not have been inspected in 28 years blew up in Texas. At least a dozen firefighters and first-responders died. Around the nation, heroes were not in short supply. Some wore uniforms. Some wore running shorts. Some wore scrubs splattered in blood.

An Elvis impersonator was arrested, then released for sending letters laced with Ricin to the president and a U.S. senator. His family said he had mental problems.

On social media, it seemed anyone who’d ever been to Boston or run in a marathon felt compelled to share his feelings. President Barack Obama made an angry speech about the Senate’s decision not to pursue intensified background checks for those who wish to purchase firearms. He also made one of his elegiac post-disaster speeches in Boston.

The news media covered all of this relentlessly. Fact and rumor went head to head. Too often rumor won. Former cops, former FBI agents and former Homeland Security experts crowded TV studios, cashing in. Rudy Giuliani was there, of course. One of the experts identified Chechnya as part of the Balkans. Everyone knows everything, nobody knows anything.

Ten, 20, 30 years from now, the Senate’s gun vote will likely be seen as the most historically significant event of the week.

By the grim calculus of sheer carnage, the West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion was a bigger disaster than Boston: Four times as many fatalities, as least as many injuries. Texas has a long and horrible record of industrial disasters. If early reports of inadequate regulation and inspection at the West plant are correct, it will magnify the tragedy. Firefighters shouldn’t have to die in the name of sloppy regulation of a potentially dangerous business.

But Boston had the optics, a terrible tragedy caught on hundreds of cameras in the midst of a civic celebration. Boston had the specter of terrorism. Boston had the drama of a manhunt and siege laid in the East Coast media heartland.

Speculation is becoming a national pastime in this nation now saturated in wall-to-wall information and guesswork. Not enough is known of motive in the Boston bombings and who else might be culpable. This could be a pair of screwed-up young men unable to understand life’s complexities.

If so, we’ve seen that before, at Columbine and Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora and Newtown. It could be an act of religious terrorism, like Fort Hood, Texas, Oak Creek, Wisc., or the 9/11 attacks.

Which is part of the trouble: The nation can barely keep up with the procession of horrors, much less absorb them, much less prescribe thoughtful remedies.

As a nation, the time is here to stop and think. And perhaps we need to care about each other, instead of finding fault in some kind of endless blame game. It’s how people in Boston and Texas are trying to heal right now.

The thing is, we can’t wait for next time. As a nation, we need to start now.